Make Mine Tiffany

Do you like Tiffany glass? A major collection of Tiffany had been collected by one man and housed in a specially-built museum in Japan. With the earthquake and tsunmai, he decided this wasn’t the best place for such and extensive collection, so he decided to auction it off earlier this year.

The auctioneer was in Alameda CA not far from me. On Saturday morning my son and I travelled to see the preview. It was amazing — stuff Louis Comfort Tiffany owned, plates, windows, lamps, vases, desk sets, and tons of other stuff.

The auction is over but you can still enjoy the catalog as a PDF (it has every piece pictured), see highlights on-line, or even buy a printed version ($45 shipped) if you call.

In the highlights click on a thumbnail to see a larger picture.

Lamps were a big part of the auction and each had it’s own lovely blown glass finial. If you want to learn more about Tiffany lamps, check out this Wikipedia article. Wikipedia also has an article about Louis Comfort Tiffany himself. It has lots of links as well as pictures of his windows.

The Metropolitan Museum’s site also has a biography that also has a lovely slideshow. The Morse Museum also has a biography along with links to pictures of parts of their collection.

This background mimics Tiffany glass in stitches. It’s very easy to do.

To bring this all back to needlepoint, I developed my clumping technique using overdyed threads, pictured above, to mimic in stitching Tiffany’s glass techniques. It’s easy to do and you can learn how in this post.